Boards

so i saw the shining on Saturday and then read up a bit about the making of it. Kubrick's method of retaking obsessively is pretty incredible, the scene with Wendy swinging the bat was done about 40 times, the scene with Hallorann talking to Danny about the shining was done 148 times, the elevator blood was only done 3 times but took 9 days to set up each time or something.

Lucas did detailed background searches on amy childhood. After working out that the only real big complaint about Episodes 4-6 were the Ewoks, he designed Jar jar Binks in order to destroy my youth, but ultimately to make me grow up.

Apparently at one point he turned to the crew and asked "Would anyone else like to spit in Malcolm's face".
also, McDowell nearly drowned during the scene where he is dunked by the police officers as he couldn't find his breathing tub in the water (so those squirms are real), in addition to suffering scratches to his corneas resulting from the forced cinema watching scene.

...often doesn't tell actors what's going to happen in certain scenes/entire films. He'll give them a few lines of dialogue, and then tell them something will happen.

Some notable examples:

- The little boy in Kes wasn't told what happens at the end of the film
- The wife in Raining Stones wasn't told about the debt collector coming round
- Robert Carlyle wasn't told about an explosion on Carla's Song... which happened right next to his hammock and almost blew him off the set

Say what you want about Ken Loach films but the acting is always, always painfully realistic. A lot of it is down to techniques like this.

the bit where Eric Cantona shows up for real in the film, the look of astonishment and delight on the postman's face is not acting...!

cf. The chestburster scene in Alien, "there'll be a bit of blood" says Ridley to the cast. They come back on set to see the crew dressed in rain macs, rain covers over the cameras, the stench of three day old animal innards wafting over the set and on the call of action, the actors are in the blast radius for a ridiculous amount of blood, so much that Veronica Cartwright screams, the falls over and hits her head.
Also, Ridley told Yaphet Kotto to not get friendly with Sigourney Weaver, so he avoided her inbetween scenes and lunchtimes and had the desired result of her genuinely getting arsey with him during takes.

The constant rewrites also got to Brando's nerve and having no motivation to keep rehearsing new lines, he was equipped with a small radio receiver - a technique he'd used on earlier films. Thewlis recollects: "[Marlon would] be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, 'There's a robbery at Woolworth's.'"

Werner Herzog invited editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus to the set to oversee continuity. Known to highly dislike Herzog's movies (with the exception of Even Dwarfs Started Small), she was so disgusted by the scenes that she started to signal the camera operator to stop shooting. Infuriated by this, Herzog threatened to hit her with a shovel.

>>I remember this knocking on the passenger window. There was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' There's the airbag, I can't see and I'm saying, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed. Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not.'

"And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' There's something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog's voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out. I got out of the car and I said, 'Thank you,' and he was gone."<<

He apparently filmed Malholland Drive from say scene 1 - 11 in the correct order. When it came to the edit he kept scene 1 and 11 but then randomly mixed up the scenes in between. Which is why the film seems to make no logical sense.

Yaphet Kotto to keep his distance and snub Sigourney Weaver during production, to amp up the hostility between the two. Think it paid dividends in the post-Dallas airlock scene, the tension is unbearable! Yaphet worried in a later interview that Ridley didn't mention this to Sigourney after and so she may still think that he hates her...!
This also works a treat in the 80's film Tin Men, Barry Levinson suggested that Danny DeVito kept his distance from Richard Dreyfuss, but he took it to a more evil level. DeVito, after weeks of failing to properly engage Dreyfuss during the read throughs, costume fittings and crew dinners, walks up to him five minutes before the first scene (an arguement over a car accident) and says "hi, how you doin? It's so great that you've taken this part, how does it feel to be the bad guy for once?". Cue Dreyfuss, getting up, going over to Levinson and getting more and more worked up, then "Action!", the scene goes off "like a bomb" in DeVito's words. They'd completely psyched Dreyfuss out.

Hitchcock told the leading lady (can't remember her name now!) that they'd be using model birds and whatnot, then when she walked into the room (on the set) he unleashed loads of real life actual birds at her. She wasn't very happy about it.

There's a theory about this, you know... Hitchcock was besotted with Grace Kelly. As in, madly in love with her. When she stopped working with him, partly in response to his strange behaviour on set, he was heartbroken and angry. As a result, every leading lady in Hitchcock's post-Kelly films has something horrible happen to them. Hedren in particular - getting savaged by birds (The Birds) and getting raped by Sean Connery (Marnie) isn't an especially good thing to have on one's CV.

Sometimes mean, sometimes laidback, sometimes incredibly benevolent... He didn't like actors though, so his techniques were usually in order to keep the stars of the studio system at the time in line. He was particularly dismissive of Ingrid Bergman's whims...

BERGMAN: What's my motivation for this scene?
HITCHCOCK: Your salary

BERGMAN: How can I generate the emotion required for...
HITCHCOCK: Ingrid... just fake it

etc. etc.

I'm not sure of the Janet Leigh story you've told, but him killing her off after only 20 minutes (this was actually revolutionary at the time... the biggest star getting killed off early in a film? Ridiculous thinking!) was seen as very cruel at the time, certainly.

Good article here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9470343/Alfred-Hitchcock-a-sadistic-prankster.html"Hitchcock bet a film's property man a week's salary that he would be too frightened to spend a whole night chained to a camera in a deserted and darkened studio. The chap heartily agreed to the wager, and at the end of the assigned day, Hitchcock himself clasped the handcuffs and pocketed the key - but not before he offered a generous beaker of brandy 'the better to ensure a quick and deep sleep'. The man thanked him for his thoughtfulness and drank the brandy, and everyone withdrew. When they arrived on the set next morning, they found the poor man angry, weeping, exhausted, and humiliated. Hitchcock had laced the brandy with the strongest available laxative, and the victim had, unavoidably, soiled himself and a wide area around his feet and the camera."
Also, I didn't know until I read this that Melanie Griffith was Tippi Hedren's daughter...

For the denouemnent of The Shining, he turned Shelly Duval into a quivering wreck by shooting the scenes of her escaping from Jack Nicholson over and over again, 80, 90, 100 times and degrading her by criticising her performance

The famous, so-called, `shower scene` in Psycho did not originally get passed by the censors when it was submitted for classification. What was it they originally ordered to be removed before they could pass it? (Hitchcock eventually got his way, however, and the scene was passed unaltered).

it's part of the reason why it was shot so cheaply. he wanted the freedom to just pursue it wherever it went. was literally making a lot of it up on the spot. people would turn up and find out they were playing a different character that day, or that suddenly they had a wife, &c.

supposedly when his crew went to recce the mansion for eyes wide shut, they went and met the owners who were this really eccentric family to give them a tour and who have all this wacky shit installed like pulling books to reveal secret passageways and corny horror stuff like that, and they were telling all these stories about how the house was haunted and they gave the crew a bit of a fright a couple of times popping out from behind secret doors, etc. anyway, they report back to kubrick that it's an amazing location but that it's haunted, and there's booby traps everywhere, and later when kubrick turned up to do his proper recce he turned up with 8 bodyguards who surrounded him and escorted him round the place. makes me laugh.